
Class Hi 

Book V. ■; 

Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Deeper Faith 



By 

Carlos Wuppermann 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Zbt TCnicfeerbocfeer. press 
1921 






Copyright, 1 92 1 

by 

J. W. Wuppermann 

Printed in the United States of America 




MAY 24 192! 



©CI.A617098 



J. i. c. 



It fortifies my soul to know 
That, though I perish, Truth is so: 
That, howsoe'er I stray and range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. 

A. H. Clough. 



FOREWORD 

THE following pages of collected notes — 
for they can lay claim to no more dig- 
nified title — are not to be taken as an attempt, 
carefully to formulate and logically to develop 
an exigent creed of life. They are rather to 
be viewed as the stray musings of one who, 
whatever his failings and limitations, has 
brought to the pursuit of truth the earnest- 
ness born of deep and enduring joy. Such 
unity as this little book possesses will be 
found to lie in the attitude toward life under- 
lying it as a whole — an attitude, one might 
say, as old as the human race, and which is 
continually and forcibly reasserting itself, in 
spite of the instinctive and oftentimes violent 
opposition of the masses of men. 



The Deeper Faith 



The Deeper Faith 



THIS universe is certainly not the best 
universe which we can imagine to exist 
— it is much better than that. Truth is 
sweeter than the sweetest song the lips of the 
poet have molded; it is not only stranger but 
also more admirable than fiction. Far be- 
yond the noblest vision of prophet and of 
saint, beyond the echo of the celestial har- 
monies, is the dwelling place of Reality, and 
our ideals are but the gossamer filaments 
which unite us to an unimaginable Beauty, 
transcending the creations of mind and heart. 
Every true philosopher foresees his ultimate 
failure ere ever he begins his task. He knows 
— who so well as he — that no system of 
human thought can adequately express the 
Glory that is beyond the stars. "Expand 
your vision as you will," says to him a secret 
3 



4 The Deeper Faith 

voice, "purify it, free it from all that seems 
to you gross and earthy, pour into it all that 
is truest in your soul, yet will it remain at the 
last but a scratched and clouded mirror, 
which distorts, even while it dimly reflects, 
the splendor of Reality." 



II 

In these days of dying creeds and of "new 
religions," of quack doctors of the soul and 
their impossible panaceas — in these days of 
mental confusion and consequent spiritual 
corwardice, it is well to remember that no true 
child of Beauty can ever perish, and that 
nothing which is not beautiful is immortal. 
If this thing be of God, if it have in it the life- 
giving breath of Beauty, it will endure, 
mauger all the syllogisms which logic may 
marshal against it. For a beautiful dream is 
invulnerable — save only in the face of a more 
beautiful dream. In the spiritual realm 
there are only pleasant surprises. Zeus over- 



The Deeper Faith 5 

throws Cronos, and Jehovah Zeus ; and always 
man's conscience approves the victory. Al- 
ways the fittest God survives, and always the 
fittest is the best. Idea clashes with idea, 
system with system, but in the end emerges 
Beauty, chaste, serene, her garments unsoiled 
by the dust of conflict. 



Ill 

If we will but open our eyes we shall see 
that there is no such thing as disillusionment. 
Smiling and unafraid we shall welcome each 
new discovery in the realm of scientific and 
philosophic thought ; for we shall understand 
that nothing can become true until it has first 
become beautiful. For Truth is the expres- 
sion of fact in terms of Beauty ; and there is 
no fact which is incapable of being thus 
apotheosized. Therefore it behooves us to 
remain undisturbed in the face of the most 
threatening fact which the future may hold in 
store ; since it is but for us to remember that 



6 The Deeper Faith 

the fact which to-day seems most inimical to 
the peace of our souls, to-morrow either will 
have ceased to be or will have been trans- 
muted into a truth even more consoling than 
that to which we now cling with all the ardor 
of our deepest desires. 



IV 

It is not possible that we should be too 
confident of the future. We know the worst 
of life, but "the best is still to be." It is not 
from too great sorrow that the gods deem it 
necessary to protect us ; it is from the light of 
a too intense happiness that they have shaded 
our eyes with their merciful wings. Man may 
look upon hell with unfaltering determina- 
tion, but the glory of heaven is not for mortal 
vision. The pure white light of Truth must 
be broken into a thousand lesser rays by the 
prism of our illusions ere it can serve for the 
strengthening of our eyes and the nourishing 
of our souls. Evil stares us in the face, a 



The Deeper Faith 7 

naked, shameless fact; but Goodness is 
modest beyond all the dwellers on Olympus. 
She is a virgin who veils her countenance from 
the gaze of her too ardent lover. She knows 
well the madness of desire which one glance 
at her unveiled loveliness would arouse in his 
soul. And she is merciful : she will not mad- 
den him with the vision of the unattainable. 
Only for a favored few, whose spiritual sight 
has been strengthened by self-discipline, has 
she consented to draw aside a little corner of 
the veil; that they might glimpse, as in a 
dream, a fragment of her shining self. And 
they remain her slaves. These are the saints 
and heroes of humanity, in whose eyes is a 
reflection of the light that never was on land 
or sea. But for us is only the silver wonder of 
our dreams, and a tremor of awe at thought of 
that which lies beyond — with steadfast grop- 
ing on and on from truth to greater truth. 
And at the last is the Vision — a seeing face to 
face. But not now. Now we must be content 
with a mystic beauty, dim and elusive ; for if 
we should, even for an instant, behold Reality 



8 The Deeper Faith 

in its pure, crystal splendor, our hearts would 
break with joy. 



In writing of Stevenson, Mr. Chesterton 
says: "It is quite inappropriate to judge 
The Teller of Tales by the particular novels 
he wrote, as one would judge Mr. George 
Moore by Esther Waters. These novels were 
only the two or three of his soul's adventures 
that he happened to tell. But he died with a 
thousand stories in his heart." Perhaps were 
these thousand untold stories the best of all 
Stevenson's stories. Perhaps what is most 
worth while in each of us is that which we 
cannot express in words, even to our dearest 
friend. It seems that the divine in us can 
never receive adequate expression in this 
life, that the highest faculties of our souls 
have no relation to the souls of others. It 
seems that we are doomed from birth to a 
sublime isolation, and that peace can be 
found only in accepting the decree of destiny 



The Deeper Faith 9 

that we should live in large measure lonely 
lives. 

Herein lies the inadequacy of utilitarianism, 
that it overlooks the uselessness, from a social 
standpoint, of much that is noblest in the hu- 
man heart. What the individual is to society 
is only a fraction of his real worth — sometimes, 
indeed, there is no relation between the two. 
Many immoral men have been of the greatest 
use to society (as witness, Napoleon) while the 
life of the saint seems to us often wasted. 

What we are to ourselves is the measure of 
our true worth; for the mark of character is 
the ability to live alone. Solitude is the 
crucible in which the metal of our souls is 
tested. Only the happiness that has passed 
unscathed through the wilderness of spiritual 
isolation, can be called genuine and enduring. 



VI 

What is the essential difference between 
the Greek and the Christian views of life? 



io The Deeper Faith 

It seems to me to lie in the absence in Greek 
thought of the Christian's sense of a certain 
inconsistency between the subjective and the 
objective worlds. The inner life was to the 
Greek adequately expressed by external 
achievements; the inner life to the Christian 
transcends all objective expression. The 
Greek had no concept of the Inexpressible, 
that concept which lends so much poignancy 
to Christian thought. 

" All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me, 
This I was worth to God,—" 

Such a sentiment is quite alien to Hellenic 
thought. The individual and the social were 
to the Greek perfectly equated, and that is 
perhaps why his concept of immortality was 
so shadowy. He had no knowledge of powers 
of the individual soul which cannot find 
adequate embodiment in the life of earth. 

From this point of view it is easy to under- 
stand the perfect balance and harmony of 
Greek art. The Hellenic artist attained ex- 



The Deeper Faith n 

haustive expression of his conscious self in his 
works, and for this reason his art lacks a sense 
of mystery. Greek art triumphs by what it 
expresses; Christian art by what it suggests. 
This is easily demonstrated by comparing the 
Parthenon with a Gothic cathedral. 



VII 

There are many Hellenists among us to- 
day ; and they have an important part to play 
in the regeneration of our civilization. In 
fact it is to them rather than to the Christians 
that we must look for the great social leaders 
who shall bring us out of the wilderness of 
social wrong into which we have strayed. 
For the danger of the Christian point of view 
lies in this : that while it emphasizes the dis- 
cord between the individual and the world, 
it places its hope in the personal development 
of the isolated soul rather than in the ever 
more adequate expression of the inner life of 
the soul in the common life of earth ; and thus 



12 The Deeper Faith 

it tends to make its adherents indifferent to 
social progress. However, it is only in at- 
tempting to mold the world to the fashion 
of our dreams that we strengthen our dreams 
so that they can transcend the world. The 
loftier the things which we learn adequately 
to express, the loftier becomes our concept 
of the Inexpressible — that concept which is 
the ultimate source of all our spiritual 
strength. 



VIII 

In the last analysis all love is the love of the 
Unknown. If to know all is to forgive all, it is 
perhaps because to know all is to become 
indifferent; and it is so easy to forgive when 
one does not care. Life may be defined as the 
presence of the Unknown; and every living 
being is simply the incarnation of a mystery. 
The more life we have, the more incompre- 
hensible we become; that is why Jesus was 
misunderstood and crucified. 



The Deeper Faith 13 

IX 

Perhaps it is not too much to say that there 
is in each one of us something which God 
Himself does not understand. Otherwise 
how could He love us as He surely does ? If 
man yearns with all his heart to understand 
God, it is not at all impossible that God may 
be yearning no less fervently to understand 
man. Perhaps this mutual yearning con- 
stitutes what we call prayer. And since God 
and man are both infinite there is no danger 
that they will ever reach that complete mu- 
tual understanding which means the death of 
love. 



But if we love only the Unknown why do 
we strive so mightily after knowledge? In 
our quest of knowledge are we not disobedient 
to the voice of love? Should we not rather 
take ignorance as our ideal? Not so. Only 
through knowledge do we enter into relation 



14 The Deeper Faith 

with the Unknown. He who knows nothing 
is ignorant even of the existence of the Un- 
known. On the other hand, every new truth 
is a window opening upon the infinite beyond. 
The realm of the Unknown is so constituted 
that the more of it man conquers and subdues 
to his service the more remains to be con- 
quered. For every apple we pluck from the 
tree of knowledge there immediately grow 
two others. 

Men are to be judged according to their 
relatively greater or less appreciation of this 
truth. Some there are who have filled their 
days to overflowing with its smiles and fra- 
grance, to whom every moment is an awful 
moment. These are the mystics or divine 
lovers. 



XI 

Humanity may be divided into two great 
classes : those who pray to live ; and those who 
live to pray. It is to the second class that 
belong the saints and mystics whose lives are 



The Deeper Faith 15 

torches kindled at the altar of love to light 
men through the caverns of doubt and the 
valley of the shadow into the splendor of 
God's eternal presence. These are they who, 
beholding all the joys which earth can offer, 
count them as nothing when compared to the 
ecstasy of spiritual union with the Beauty 
that is beyond the stars. They come to God 
not in the fond hope that in so doing they 
shall escape misfortune, defeat, and pain, and 
whatever other ills the flesh is heir to, but as 
to a Friend whose love more than compen- 
sates for all the suffering which existence 
upon this earth inevitably entails upon every 
son of man. They know that in the world 
they shall have tribulation, but they know 
also that divine peace has overcome the world. 
Far from praying that they be released from 
the bonds of pain, their only petition is that 
they may be allowed to suffer with their 
Master ; that they may have the courage and 
the strength to take up their cross and follow 
him. And if the cross be not sent them from 
on high they hew it from the wormwood of 



16 The Deeper Faith 

their consequent grief. They inflict needless 
suffering on themselves; since love must 
suffer for the beloved or die. And they ask 
of God no reward but the joy of His presence, 
and the light of His countenance. ' ' Well hast 
thou written of me, Thomas," spake to the an- 
gelic doctor the voice from the crucifix, "what 
reward wouldst thou have ? ' ' And swift came 
back the answer : ' ' None other than thyself, 
Lord." 



XII 

It is scarcely to be denied that the religious 
attitude is not confined to religion. We are 
all religious about something in life ; for to be 
religious about an object is simply to treat 
that object as the ultimate good to the attain- 
ment of which every other desire is to be 
subordinated. Some of us have a religion of 
money; others of fame and power; others of 
art; others still of morality. May we not say 
that the mystic is unique in that he is religious 
about God? To be at one with God, that is, 



The Deeper Faith 17 

ideally at least, the motive of his every 
thought and deed. Even morality is but the 
means of a closer union with the Eternal; 
the good is the unblemished marble from 
which are hewn the steps that lead to the 
throne of the Spirit. We must climb the 
steps, but only as the preliminary to seeing 
God face to face. For contemplation is the 
highest form of activity; and the hour of 
prayer more to be honored than the day of 
labor. It is for this reason that the Catholic 
Church ranks the passive virtues above the 
active. She teaches her children to work 
better that they may pray better ; and all the 
other activities of the Catholic life are by her 
directed to adoration as a final end. 



XIII 

This is the distinction between supersti- 
tion and true religion: that whereas the 
former seeks to enlist the aid of supernatural 
agencies in man's behalf in his struggle to 



18 The Deeper Faith 

survive, the latter raises man himself above 
the consideration of his personal welfare into 
the shining realm of spiritual values where 
abides the peace that passeth human under- 
standing. The one degrades the gods into 
hirelings of man's pleasure, making them sub- 
servient to his cupidity and lust for power; 
the other, crushing every selfish desire, trans- 
forms man into the son of God, an inheritor 
of the kingdom of heaven. 



XIV 

No man may count himself free of super- 
stitition who has not fully accepted the truth 
that "it is only when the soul is simply up- 
lifted on high that prayer can be beautiful." 
Conversely, to make that truth one's own, 
to try the virtue of one's prayer by the fire of 
an ideal so pure, is to rise above the dust and 
turmoil of earthly living, and to find the peace 
of home in that super-personal heaven where 
alone the bird of human happiness sings, and 



The Deeper Faith 19 

nests, and multiplies. It is to be loosed from 
the bonds of nameless fears, the haggard off- 
spring of superstition. It is to declare truce 
between those ancient enemies, science and 
religion; to evaluate each in the light of the 
whole of existence; to recognize, in science 
the mistress of earth, in religion the scaler of 
the skies. Finally, it is to feel the discords 
of being resolve into exquisite harmonies, to 
hear in the hush of the daybreak the morning 
stars singing together. 



XV 

There are some people who assert that 
they never pray ; and it is among these people 
that one frequently finds many of the nobler 
forms of prayer most highly developed. I 
have come to believe that the artist in the 
hour of completing his masterpiece, the 
mother pressing her new-born baby to her 
heart with sobs of joy, the lover looking si- 
lently into the eyes of his beloved, two friends 



20 The Deeper Faith 

clasping hands after a long absence — I have 
come to believe that all these, and many 
more, do indeed utter prayers as beautiful as 
any which have sprung from the devotions of 
the mystic and the saint. For even as that is 
no prayer which does not lift the soul above 
the consideration of its own welfare, so con- 
versely every form of adoration which induces 
self-forgetfulness contains the elements of 
true prayer. Since there is nothing above us 
but God, to be lifted above oneself is always 
in some measure to be lifted into God, and to 
forget oneself is to remember Him. Thus it 
happens that many who do not know Him 
with their conscious minds, worship Him 
unconsciously in the works of His creation. 
And perhaps is this the best and surest way of 
worshiping Him, the one least likely to mis- 
lead us into the penumbra of superstition. 
It is not easy to mistake a sunset, a dog, or 
even a man, for God ; it is far easier to accept 
the image of the Eternal in our minds for the 
transcendent Reality it vainly strives ade- 
quately to express. 



The Deeper Faith 21 

XVI 

There is in the lowest being wearing human 
shape, in the criminal, the drunkard, the 
prostitute, and nameless creatures infinitely 
beneath these — there is in each one something 
higher than our highest conception of God. 
And with this Something every true prayer 
brings us into communion. It is "the Un- 
seen behind the Seen; the Unknown behind 
the Observed." Jesus, dogmatizes the ra- 
tionalist, Jesus was after all a mere man. 
Let us not tremble at the insinuation; it is 
not true. No man is a mere man — not Jesus 
nor another. 



XVII 

This, I suppose, is the essence of Chris- 
tianity, as it is of all true religion ; that things 
are more than they seem, and that about 
every human head there is a halo, a reflection 
of the central Light, — had we but eyes to 
see! But we are blind; we see only a moun- 



22 The Deeper Faith 

tain, a star, a man, not the glory they were 
intended to reveal. Too often it is with us 
as it was with Hellriegel in Und Pippa Tanzt; 
we must be blinded to the beauty of the 
material world before we can see the palace of 
the Spirit and "the great, golden steps" 
leading thereto. 

And yet there is surely for each of us, some- 
where in this narrow little world of ours, a 
holy place, a shrine made glad with flowers, 
where we can bow the knee and beautifully 
adore. For each of us there exists a threshold 
which we dare not cross except we loose the 
sandals from our feet. Perhaps it is more 
often the threshold of a heart than of a church ; 
perhaps it is rather in the kiss of the beloved 
than in the absolution of the priest that God's 
forgiveness is poured out upon us. In either 
case the simplest, most commonplace word 
we utter in the shadow of the sanctuary is in 
reality a prayer, beautiful and pure. Brother, 
go thou into thy temple, and I will go into 
mine; and though thine be built of precious 
stone and costly metal, and mine of the in- 



The Deeper Faith 23 

nocent laughter of a little child and the sacred 
depths of his mother's soul, yet will our 
prayers be common prayer. We shall be 
nearer one another than if we were kneeling 
side by side at the altar of a Church to which 
we were both strangers. Our prayers shall 
meet before the throne of God, and know each 
other, and kiss, and bow hand in hand before 
the Father. 



XVIII 

It does not matter to whom we pray, nor 
what words we use; what matters is the mo- 
tive. The peasant woman whose worship of 
the Blessed Virgin is, in part at least, the ex- 
pression of sincere admiration for the divine 
purity of the maiden called Mary, is far less 
superstitious than the rationalizing Protes- 
tant philosopher who, scorning intermediaries, 
petitions God the Father for success in the 
daily affairs of life. 

There is finally but one form of idolatry: 
that which makes of man's intercourse with 



24 The Deeper Faith 

the divine a means rather than an end. All 
sincere worship, even if it be but the worship 
of a god of stone, is accepted of the Spirit. 



XIX 

It may be that we are moving toward 
unity in religion ; but it is surely not the unity 
of explicit agreement. It is unity in diversity ; 
the unity which is always present when two 
or three seekers after truth are gathered to- 
gether in a spirit of perfect tolerance. 

The old phrases, the ancient formulas, 
which have so long and faithfully served the 
spiritual interests of the mass of humanity, 
are proving less and less efficient. They are 
loyal servants, grown feeble with age, whose 
willing feet are no longer able to bear them on 
their master's errands. So long as man de- 
sires it so long will they strive to do his bid- 
ding; even though many, unable to reach their 
destination, stagger and fall exhausted by the 
wayside. Were it not better to retire them 



The Deeper Faith 25 

from service? A new generation is at hand; 
let us welcome them, unafraid. See, there 
are many — enough for all. And they are 
stronger and swifter than the old. 



XX 

Truly the time seems at hand when each of 
us must give vent to the insatiable mysticism 
within him in words of his own choosing. 
Some also there will be who will find words 
themselves inadequate, and who will embody 
the ineffable longing of their souls in a kiss or 
a silent tear. And every kiss that is more 
than passion, and every tear that is other than 
self-pity, is a true prayer. Was it not, ac- 
cording to the legend — and the legends are 
the great truths gleaned from the facts of 
history — was it not by a kiss that the Virgin 
Mary, whom we may well call the spirit of 
prayer incarnate, was immaculately con- 
ceived? And every child is potentially a 
prayer incarnate — even the children of the 
imagination that exist only in our souls. 



26 The Deeper Faith 

XXI 

One summer evening I was walking along 
the shore of the Atlantic. The great moon 
was rising from the waters, and as she began 
her majestical ascent she deigned to send a 
greeting to me, lonely wanderer on the shores 
of earth — a single silver ray that floated on 
the dark waves like a fairy ladder woven of 
the locks of naiads and sea maidens. I 
wandered on; and still the ladder followed 
me; up and down, backward and forward, I 
could not escape its insistent, luring glory. 
And it came to me that for every human being 
there is a ladder to the moon ; though all are 
hidden from my sight save this which gracious 
heaven has given to be mine. But in the sky 
the ladders melt into a perfect orb. 



XXII 

We all, like Cyrano, are homesick for the 
moon. Earth with its glories that endure for 
a day can never satisfy us, lonely exiles from 



The Deeper Faith 27 

the kingdom of the Eternal. All the fruits 
of the garden of pleasure will not still the 
hunger of the soul. In vain have we striven 
to drown the still, small voice of the Spirit in 
the roar of the whirling torrents of the active 
life. In vain have we wrested from the earth 
the hidden treasures of her wealth; in vain 
have we bridled the forces of nature and made 
them obedient to our desires; in vain all our 
industrial enterprise, our material success. 
In the twilight hour of silence and rest come 
the words of our condemnation: "To be is 
more than to do — and does more." 



XXIII 

As a people we have chosen prosperity as 
our ideal; and by thrift and industry, the 
virtues which man shares with the ant and 
the bee, we have in large measure attained 
the desired ends. We are prosperous, we are 
successful. And what, in effect, has pros- 
perity brought us? Greater happiness? Is 



28 The Deeper Faith 

the American millionaire happier than the Ital- 
ian peasant? Has he attained a deeper, surer 
peace of soul ? Does he offer greater reverence 
to the trinity of goodness, beauty, and truth? 
I wonder if it is not high time that we 
closed our Franklins and opened our Emer- 
sons ; that we turned from the multitudinous 
volumes on how to succeed with which our 
bookshelves are laden to the rare master- 
pieces of literature, which teach us how to 
fail. It is so much easier to succeed than to 
fail! And the time cries aloud for men with 
the courage to snap their fingers in the face 
of fortune, and to embrace poverty and pain, 
and the contempt of their fellowmen, for a 
dream's sake and the love of their persecutors. 

XXIV 

Nature is one great struggle, the blunder- 
ing incarnation of the will to live; and the 
natural man is still in all his acts under the 
spell of the domineering mistress. To free 
him from that anachronistic spell is the pur- 



The Deeper Faith 29 

pose of all true religion. This alone is re- 
demption; this is joy; to be able to say, "I 
have done with the struggle for mere exist- 
ence; I care not to live, but only to live well; 
beyond all change is that which abides, and 
that alone is Reality to me." 

But how far from this spirit of other- 
worldliness have not our modern religions 
wandered! Those who should be spiritual 
leaders have grown impatient; they have 
come down from the lonely peaks, from the 
rarefied atmosphere of the ideal, to make 
truce with the unaspiring multitude in the 
valleys. They have come down; and they 
have left the ancient beacon lights to be 
extinguished. They waited so long for hu- 
manity to mount to them! Nevertheless 
they should have remained on the heights. 
They were nearer the stars. 



XXV 

And yet, though few in number, they are 
with us to-day, as they always have been 



30 The Deeper Faith 

with us — the saints and the martyrs. Si- 
lently, without ostentation, they pursue the 
path of renunciation, and we are scarcely 
conscious of their presence until they are 
taken from us. Then, indeed, it seems that a 
certain glory has passed from the earth ; and 
we cannot understand how the departure of 
one whom the world long ago proclaimed a 
failure could affect us so deeply. Is it per- 
haps that the useless things are the most 
divine? Or that greater than the man who 
teaches us how to use the resources of the 
world and nature for our aggrandizement is 
he who proves to us of how little value they 
are in solving the problems of human exist- 
ence? It may be indeed that the man who 
demonstrates to us that we can attain the 
highest happiness without wealth is a greater 
genius than the inventor of innumerable 
machines for the production of wealth; and 
that in the firmament of human greatness the 
star of Emerson outshines that of Edison. 

Socrates, Jesus, Saint Francis, Giordano 
Bruno, Karl Marx — the great failures! It is 



The Deeper Faith 3 l 

to them that humanity builds its loftiest 
monuments in marble and song! 



XXVI 

Lord, grant us the will to fail! Be that our 
morning, and our evening, prayer. Grant us 
to be accounted knaves, so but Thy Goodness 
be brought a little nearer earth; grant us to 
be accounted fools, so but Thy wisdom find a 
haven in men's hearts; grant us to be ac- 
counted outcasts, so but Thy beauty brighten 
the days of the humble; grant us to suffer all 
things and to die, so but Thy kingdom come. 



XXVII 

The will to fail — is it not after all but 
another name for love? And in using the 
word love I am thinking not only of that 
larger, cosmic emotion which teaches us to 
stretch out our arms to the universe to em- 



32 The Deeper Faith 

brace it, but also of that individualized, per- 
sonal affection to which we turn for comfort 
in the night of discouragement when the 
stars seem more than usually remote. Surely 
there were hours in the public career of Jesus 
of Nazareth when even the inveterate con- 
sciousness of his exalted mission would have 
proved insufficient protection against the 
barbed shafts of multitudinous indifference 
and hate, without the warm, fragrant smiles 
and thrilling handclasps of Peter and John 
and Mary of Magdala. And even at the last 
when, apparently deserted by all his followers, 
he was left alone with God and his own soul, 
perhaps it was the memory of one supremely 
glorious Sabbath on which he walked amid 
the yellow fields of ripening corn with the 
disciples whom he loved, and the sun shone 
as never before, and the birds sang to the 
listening heart, — perhaps it was some such 
memory as much as the expectation of ap- 
proaching triumph in heaven, that saved from 
surrender his strained and staggering will. 
In that wonderful silence before Caiaphas, the 



The Deeper Faith 33 

most eloquent silence in the world's history, 
who shall say that it was not the remembered 
warmth of a mother's kisses on his boyhood 
lips that kept those lips inviolate from the 
staining words of anger or reproach! 



XXVIII 

Somewhere in one of Ellen Key's remark- 
able books there occurs a lengthy discussion 
of that universal, all-embracing love which 
is the ideal and the way of Buddhism and of 
Christianity. Ellen Key finds such a love 
impracticable, and in any case undesirable, 
since its triumph in the hearts of men would 
in her opinion spell the destruction of that 
individualized, personal, affection which is 
indeed the very crown of human life. Is it 
not better, she seems to ask us, to love one 
than all? — implying by the query that the 
two forms of love, the universal and the in- 
dividual, are mutually exclusive. Nay, the 
very nature of love itself makes any command 



34 The Deeper Faith 

to love all men indiscriminately meaningless 
and absurd. Love is an instinctive choosing 
of one from among many ; and to attempt to 
spread it over the many is simply to dilute 
it into good-natured indifference. Further- 
more, love is based upon contrast; to love 
certain people is to hate others. 

Such is the argument; and it may be 
that it has sufficient plausibility to de- 
ceive the more casual reader, even though 
it is based upon a fallacy that must be 
quite obvious to the thoughtful critic. I 
mean the fallacy of attempting to measure 
the possibilities of so infinite a spiritual force 
as love by the inconsequent deductions of 
logic. 

For there is no limit to be set to the possible 
development of love; its future is as un- 
bounded as that of the universe itself; and 
the higher the starting point the nearer 
heaven shall we be at the sunset hour. Let us 
begin with the universal love of humanity, 
the charity of Saint Paul. Is it impossible to 
build beyond that? By no means. Universal 



The Deeper Faith 35 

charity is the foundation upon which is to be 
built the glorious superstructure of individual 
affection; and the firmer and broader the 
foundation the more enduring will be the 
superstructure. If I love all men as brothers 
I shall love my brother with more than a 
brother's affection. If I learn to honor and 
respect all women, even the fallen and de- 
graded, by so much shall I increase the honor 
and respect which I cherish for my mother, 
my sister, my wife. There is no antithesis 
between universal and individual love; on 
the contrary, they rise and fall together. The 
nobler our love for all humanity becomes, the 
nobler becomes likewise our love for the few 
whom we call our friends. Thus it was that 
Jesus, who loved humanity with a love so 
profound and all-consuming that after nine- 
teen centuries it shines on as the light 
of the world with undiminished intensity 
and grandeur, loved Lazarus and Mary 
and John with an individualized affection 
no less exceptionally beautiful and en- 
during. 



36 The Deeper Faith 

XXIX 

He who would increase his love for the 
noble can best accomplish that purpose by 
learning to love the ignoble. Try to admire 
the sinner if you would broaden and beautify 
your worship of the saint. The problem of 
enriching the life of the soul is the problem of 
finding God in the lowest. When you have 
discovered the divinity that hides in the heart 
of a rose do you think that you are less likely 
to see God in the eyes of a friend ? Do you 
hesitate to love the Magdalene lest in so doing 
you make less beautiful your worship of the 
Virgin Mary? It is a vain and foolish fear; 
for there is no love which does not render the 
heart more capable of beautiful worship. 



XXX 

It may be that contrast is of the essence of 
love ; but it is not the contrast between love 
and hate, it is at most the contrast between 
love and love. In the heart of the mystic 



The Deeper Faith 37 

there is no room for hate. He does not hate 
the sinner for he sees in him an undeveloped 
saint ; he does not hate the evil, for it is just 
good in the making. 



XXXI 

Of course in all this I am thinking of an 
idealized personal affection far removed from 
the selfish passion which so often to-day 
passes current as love in the sexes. " Is it not 
strange," said a friend to me not long ago, 
"is it not strange that so often as a man and 
a woman learn to love each other they be- 
come daily more self-centered and indifferent 
to others? They seem to lose all sense of 
obligation to parents, to friends, to the suffer- 
ing, struggling world of men, and to think 
only of the attainment of their desire in 
mutual exclusive possession." It is not 
strange when one considers how important a 
part selfish passion still plays in the love of 
man and woman for each other. For this is 
the difference between passion and love, that 



38 The Deeper Faith 

the former weakens the sentiment of uni- 
versal charity in the human heart, the latter 
strengthens it. He who truly loves a woman 
will love all women for her sweet sake; yes, 
all life will seem sacred to him because she 
has smiled upon it. He will find new wonder 
in. the sunset and a strange melody in the 
running brook. The stars will shine with an 
unforeseen tenderness, and the children open 
their hearts to reveal secret treasures of good- 
ness and beauty. And all this independent of 
whether his beloved returns his affection, or 
not. But he whose love is just passion will be 
blinded to all the splendors of God's universe, 
and see only the one woman for the posses- 
sion of whom he will fight as a beast for its 
prey, selfishly, without pity. And should he 
fail to win her, then will life itself lose all 
meaning for him. 

XXXII 

"It seems to me," said one day a woman 
who is of the pure in heart that have seen 



The Deeper Faith 39 

God, "that the tragedy of many marriages 
arises from the fact that whereas a woman's 
love grows ever stronger and more wonderful, 
a man's love too often ceases to develop after 
marriage, or even diminishes and dies away, 
as a tide that has reached its flood." It is 
because woman's love is usually built upon a 
surer foundation, a broader spirit of charity, 
an instinctive understanding of sorrow. So 
it happens that a woman's love is seldom an 
unhappy love, for whether or not she pos- 
sesses the man she loves, her love itself will be 
a light and a comfort to her. It will glorify all 
her life. This is doubtless what Byron meant 
when he said that love was woman's whole 
existence. It is not that she has greater need of 
the man than he of her, but that she lives more 
constantly in the presence of her love. She 
takes it with her to her daily tasks and allows 
its splendor to transfigure all the little relation- 
ships of common life. Her love becomes so 
great and pure that it overflows the capacity 
of the man she loves, and she stretches out 
her arms to the whole universe to embrace it. 



40 The Deeper Faith 

XXXIII 

In that splendid epic of modern American 
life and love, Robert Herrick's Together, there 
is portrayed a woman in whose heart burns 
the fire of the highest love. Margaret and 
Robert, predestined lovers, have snatched 
from fate a few days' supreme happiness, but 
are now forced to part, each to return to the 
path of stern and unrelenting duty. And 
the woman speaks: " . . . . It can never 
be as it was before for you or me. We shall 
carry away something from our feast to feed 
on all our lives. We shall have enough to 
give others. Love makes you rich — so rich! 
We must give it away all our lives. We shall, 
dearest, never fear." And again: "My 
children, my children," she murmured, "I 
love them more — I can do for them more. 
And for dear Mother Pole — and even for him. 
I shall be gentler — I shall understand. . . . 
Love was set before me. I have taken it, and 
it has made me strong. I will be glad and love 
the world, all of it, for your sake, because you 






The Deeper Faith 4 1 

have blessed me. . . . Ours is not the fire 
that turns inward and feeds upon itself." 

' ' Love makes you rich — so rich ! We must 
give it away all our lives." So speaks the 
highest love, burning away forever the false 
antithesis between individual and universal, 
and rising through the passionate yearning 
for at-onement with the beloved to the 
mysticial desire for union with the Spirit in 
all created things. 



XXXIV 

It is in the realm of spiritual values that 
every true marriage takes place, for it is there 
that human souls approach nearest one an- 
other. It is there that, lifted above ourselves, 
we are most ourselves. It is there that the 
pearl of purity which lies buried in every 
human heart is brought to light ; the pearl of 
great price which one dare not cast before 
swine. It is there, on the heights of the spirit, 
in the face of God's heaven, not in the dark 



42 The Deeper Faith 

valley of passion, that every child should be 
conceived. 



XXXV 

The period of courtship is usually one of 
pure idealism; but how often marriage, in- 
stead of being the fulfillment of love, spells its 
destruction ! How often beneath the words of 
the priestly benediction lurks the unspoken 
venomous curse of fate ! It seems indeed that 
the physical element which enters at marriage 
is destructive of all but the highest love, and 
that the first embrace of the bridal night will 
prove disastrous to every affection that was 
born in passion. Let but the suggestion of 
selfish indulgence intrude itself and find a 
moment's welcome, and immediately the 
spell is broken. Immediately the physical 
loses its symbolic, sacramental efficacy, and 
becomes, instead of an instrument of the 
spirit, a flaming barrier from which the timid 
soul recoils in terror. 



The Deeper Faith 43 

It is vain to prate of a lawful indulgence of 
passion; since there are no lawful indulgences. 
The physical for its own sake is always sin; 
and to lust after one's own wife is as bad as, 
perhaps worse than, to covet the wife of one's 
neighbor. "They would have her go," says 
Guido, the husband of Monna Vanna, "they 
would have her go and yield up to him that 
body which no man ever dared to think on 
with so much as a passing breath of desire, so 
virginal did it appear; from which I, her hus- 
band, ventured not to draw the veils but with 
a charge to my hands, my eyes, to keep per- 
fect reverence, lest I should sully it by one 
ill-governed thought . ' ' 



XXXVI 

There is a kiss which blinds and degrades; 
it is the kiss of passion. But there is another 
kiss which is just the expression of the long- 
ing of two personalities to become one ; a kiss 
which illumines life and draws the soul nearer 



44 The Deeper Faith 

the invisible loveliness which is at the heart of 
things. It is the kiss of the highest love. 

Again, and yet again ! and here and here. 
Let me with kisses burn this body away, 
That our two souls may dart together free. 
I fret at intervention of the flesh, 
And I would clasp you — you that but inhabit 
This lovely house. 

So speaks the voice of the highest love, to 
which every desire has value only as the path 
to something beyond itself. Passion is transi- 
tory and finite; it seeks its own satisfaction, 
and no sooner has it attained its desire than 
it begins to wane. It is as a runner who, 
breasting the tape victorious, in the moment 
of triumph staggers and falls dead. But the 
highest love is infinite, never finally satis- 
fied; since it seeks only to give and still to 
give, and in giving grows stronger and more 
beautiful day by day. This is the love which 
is born in the realm of spiritual values. And 
this love is eternal and ever patient; fearing 
not bodily separation nor death ; knowing not 
jealousy nor deceit. 



The Deeper Faith 45 

XXXVII 

The entrance of the intellectual element 
into love, through the emancipation of 
woman, is destined to play an important part 
in the ennobling of love in the sexes. It is 
not possible to lust after a woman with whom 
one has shared the loftiest beliefs of one's 
heart ; and a degrading passion can exist only 
between two beings that have never looked 
into each other's soul. 



XXXVIII 

As long as woman was intellectually a 
child, she was content to be loved as a child ; 
but now that she has been allowed to grow 
into the full stature of a human being, now 
that her personality has been granted the 
inalienable privilege of self-development, 
she will demand of love not only spirit- 
ual and physical, but also intellectual satis- 
faction. 



46 The Deeper Faith 

"First of all," says Ibsen's Nora, "I am a 
human being like you," and in those burning 
words of sudden, lightning-like conviction is 
voiced the credo of the modern woman. 
Deeper than masculine and feminine is the 
human, and on this common ground must 
man and woman meet if their relationship is 
to be beautiful and enduring. The portal to 
every personality is the intellect ; and woman, 
as a developed personality, may be ap- 
proached only through her intellect. Great 
and pure thoughts stand sentinel at the out- 
posts of her soul, and if one would gain 
entrance to the inner sanctuary one must 
know the passwords. One must be able to 
answer her questioning eyes ere one presumes 
to ask of her the spiritual treasures that lie 
hidden in the depths of her being. If you 
cannot enter into the thoughts of the woman 
you love, all your devotion and sacrifice will 
be in vain; you will never win her deepest 
affection. Once, when woman was only feel- 
ing, it might have been possible; but it is no 
longer so. 



The Deeper Faith 47 

xxxix 

Let us not fear that in becoming more 
intellectual love will lose its emotional in- 
tensity. There is nothing so emotional as 
thought, and an ideal is more ravishing than 
the most beautiful goddess. In this connec- 
tion one may recall the anecdote related of 
Gounod, how one day, on having the Coper- 
nican system explained to him by a friend, 
he burst into tears and cried, "How beauti- 
ful!" Because Wagner was the most intel- 
lectual, he was also the most emotional of 
composers. In his Niebelungen Ring he set 
metaphysics to music, and produced a work 
so freighted with intensity of feeling that it 
almost oversteps the boundaries of art. 
Beside this how pallid seem the efforts of the 
Italian composers, dealing as they do with the 
petty passions of men and women who do not 
understand life ! Wagner is not content with 
arousing our sympathies for this man or that 
woman, he wishes to make us feel for the 
common aspirations of all humanity, nay, of 



48 The Deeper Faith 

the whole universe; and as the universe 
transcends the individual being it contains, so 
does Wagner's sympathy transcend that of a 
mere opera composer. The emotion which 
springs from a great thought is always more 
profound than the emotion which is simply 
the reflection of a perceived emotion or the 
answer to the stimulus of a sense impression. 
Great as is my admiration for the physical 
beauty of the woman I love it is as nothing 
compared to my admiration for the ideal of 
beauty which she cherishes in her soul; nay, 
it is primarily as an expression of the inner 
ideal that her physical loveliness has value. 



XL 

Consider, also, that there is no beautiful 
thought which does not become more beauti- 
ful the moment it is shared with a woman. 
I bring to the woman I love all my purest 
thoughts, my most cherished dreams; and 
she has no sooner smiled upon them than they 



The Deeper Faith 49 

begin to shine with a new radiance. It 
seems, indeed, that a woman's smile is like 
the magic diamond in The Blue Bird; it makes 
visible the essence of things, which is Beauty. 
I never knew how beautiful were my ideals 
until one day I saw them shining in the 
depths of a pure woman's soul. Then indeed 
it was revealed to me ; and I have never since 
doubted that the highest privilege a human 
being may possess is the privilege of living 
and dying for a dream. 



XLI 

Once it was deemed that true love must be 
unchanging; now, however, we begin to see 
that the highest love changes constantly. It 
gains in depth and compass with the addition 
of every new ideal. Day by day it reveals 
fresh wonders to us; day by day our dreams 
become more beautiful as we learn to share 
them with the being we adore ; day by day our 
love itself grows purer, since there is nothing 



50 The Deeper Faith 

more fatal to unworthy passion than a com- 
mon fund of ideals. Every thought that you 
share with your beloved is a bond of union 
stronger than a thousand kisses. Should 
death separate you from her to-night do you 
think it would be the memory of an embrace 
which would be of greatest comfort to you in 
your lonely life beyond the grave? Would it 
not rather be a beautiful ideal which a few 
chance words of hers revealed to you one 
evening as you walked side by side beneath 
the stars? 



XLII 

We hear much, in life and in art, of the 
conflict between love and duty. How many 
of the great tragedies has not the putative 
clash of these two forces in the hearts of men 
and women brought forth? Corneille, it 
seems, could think of nothing else. And yet, 
as one attains a deeper insight into the na- 
tures of love and of duty, one realizes that any 
real conflict between them is impossible, that 



The Deeper Faith 51 

what seems so must be illusory, or at most a 
conflict between greater love and less. If in 
order to possess the woman I love I disobey 
the clear dictates of conscience, I am sinning 
perhaps not so much against duty as against 
love. I have made my love less beautiful 
than it might have been; I have placed be- 
tween my soul and the soul of the woman I 
adore the accusing body of a slain ideal. 
There are thus people who say that they love 
each other, whose souls are in reality sepa- 
rated by an impassable field of carnage, 
whereon are the mangled forms of dead and 
dying dreams and aspirations. 



XLIII 

Every time I obey the voice of duty I am 
brought one step nearer the woman whom I 
love. It may be that duty has forbidden me 
ever to see her again ; it does not matter ; our 
souls are approaching each other day by day. 
I know that she is watching me with the eyes 



52 The Deeper Faith 

of the soul; that she sees every step, that she 
smiles upon me when I am strong, that she 
encourages me when I falter, that she com- 
forts me and helps me to rise when I have 
stumbled and fallen. 



XLIV 

Have you never, in an hour of spiritual 
depression, experienced a sudden, mysterious 
tremor of joy that stirred your torpid blood 
into a new ecstasy? You do not know what 
it is nor why it visits you, this healing ray 
from an invisible sun of gladness ; but it may 
be a secret messenger of the Spirit who comes 
to tell you that someone you love has just 
accomplished a noble act of self-sacrifice, or 
has given voice to a divine truth, or has gazed 
reverently upon beauty. 

XLV 

We hear it often asserted that love justi- 
fies everything, and we are asked to sympa- 



The Deeper Faith 53 

thize with those who for their love's sake have 
sacrificed honor, faith, ideals. But there is 
only one thing that love can justify, and that 
is goodness. It is the absence of love that 
excuses, if it does not justify, the commission 
of an evil deed. He who has never known the 
joy of a supreme love, he is at a disadvantage 
in his struggle to live nobly, purely. We 
must judge him more leniently than his 
brother to whom has been granted the un- 
shaken flame of the lamp of personal love by 
which to guide his footsteps through the 
Daedalian grottoes of human existence. The 
highest love brings responsibilities, not priv- 
ileges; and he who truly loves knows himself 
under special obligation to live the faithful 
warrior of divine virtue. 



XLVI 

There is no compelling reason why a man 
and a woman who love each other should live 



54 The Deeper Faith 

together. The right to cohabit is dependent 
upon many other considerations besides the 
existence of a mutual affection, and it is only 
in heeding the injunctions of the social con- 
science that love remains love. Physical 
separation cannot kill love; infidelity to the 
ideal of duty can and does. Sometimes the 
only way a man and a woman can remain true 
to each other is by parting. 

This willingness to surrender the beloved 
at the first summons from the clarion voice of 
duty is the supreme test of the worth of a 
love. He who remains with the woman he 
adores after conscience has bade him depart, 
is a traitor to the highest love. If you cannot 
live without your beloved, you may be sure 
that your affection is still of an inferior 
quality. If in loving her you have not 
learned to love life more, if the divinest 
of passions have not awakened in your 
soul a realization of its own powers of 
blessedness independent of every external 
support, then you have not yet reached the 
inner sanctuary. 



The Deeper Faith 55 

XLVII 

He who could not live without God does 
not love God as He surely desires to be loved. 
What he loves is not God but the sense of 
personal security with which the belief in the 
existence of God inspires him. Too often the 
fear of the misfortunes which we imagine 
would immediately overwhelm us were we 
obliged to live without the help of our God 
induces us to cling to an outgrown, unworthy 
conception of God; such a conception, for 
example, as that of a God who makes belief 
in His existence requisite to man's salvation ; 
since only a God who knew that His con- 
tinued existence was dependent on man's 
belief in Him could attach so much impor- 
tance to that belief. 



XLVIII 

Is it not the fear of never finding Truth, 
and of the consequent dispiriting sense of 



56 The Deeper Faith 

failure and disillusionment, which urges so 
many philosophers to accept as ultimate 
Truth some meticulous creation of their over- 
wrought brains? "Eureka," they cry; "I 
have found it!" And the greater is their 
fear of being mistaken the louder do they 
shout; as a child, terrified by the darkness, 
tries to reassure itself by the sound of its own 
voice. 

This is the lust of the intellect which is but 
another name for fear; the single deep- 
grounded selfishness of the human heart, the 
essential . egotism whose poisonous tendrils 
are so entangled with the roots of our con- 
scious spiritual life that it sometimes seems 
as though we could not extirpate the evil 
without blighting the good, that we must 
allow wheat and tares to grow side by 
side unto some far-off, uncertain harvest. 
Nevertheless it is possible to purify the 
garden of life; as the great and good 
men of all ages have amply proven. It 
is but necessary that we have courage and 
patience. 



The Deeper Faith 57 

XLIX 

Let us compare for a moment two modern 
thinkers who illustrate the antithesis between 
love and lust in the world of philosophy. 

Maeterlinck is free of lust, as of fear. He 
is the most chaste of modern thinkers. His 
love of Truth is purged of selfish motives, 
lofty and enduring ; for he has learned to live 
without Truth, to clear his vision and purify 
his heart, in awaiting the gift of the gods, and 
to find in these very processes the quiet 
strength of soul sufficient for a beautiful and 
happy existence. 

There is something majestic about Maeter- 
linck's progress toward Truth: he moves with 
the royal tread of one who knows himself 
supreme ruler of the noblest of kingdoms — 
his own soul ! Looking back over the way he 
has trodden, as indicated by the successive 
works that bear his name, one is struck by 
the absence of dust — as far as the eye can see 
the road stretches away smooth and undis- 
turbed. He travels always on foot and so 



58 The Deeper Faith 

quietly that he disturbs nothing; even the 
birds do not cease singing at his approach. 
There is naught of interest on the journey 
that escapes his notice, not a flower whose 
joy he has not shared ; and yet, if he does not 
hurry neither does he delay, nor will he think 
of resting till he has reached the far horizon. 

Contrast with this the headlong, vertigi- 
nous rush of Nietzsche's imagination, posting 
with wanton haste from mistress to mistress, 
and embracing each new illusion with the 
same greedy, relentless passion, until madness 
mercifully ends the pitiful debauchery of a 
gifted intellect. Nietzsche is the Don Juan 
of modern philosophers, Maeterlinck the 
Saint Francis of Assisi. And it is to Saint 
Francis that we go for Truth. 



There is a kind of slavery from the evil 
influence of which few indeed can boast ex- 
emption: it is the slavery to an ideal. And 



The Deeper Faith 59 

just because an ideal is more ravishing than 
the most beautiful of goddesses it is expedient 
that we be emancipated from this last form 
of bondage. For, as history amply demon- 
strates, slavery to an ideal gives birth to 
many of the most despicable passions of 
which human nature is capable, fanaticism 
and hatred, and their concomitant cruelties. 
We have but to recall the religious persecu- 
tions with which the pages of European 
history are stained to realize the dire and nec- 
essary outcome of the enslavement of the 
human mind to an ideal — in this case that of 
theological conformity. And this dire out- 
come is inevitable however noble in itself the 
enslaving ideal may be. 

Maeterlinck desires to free us from bond- 
age to our ideals. He urges us to open the win- 
dows of our souls that the free air of heaven 
may sweep through them, making all things 
sweet and radiant. He calls us out of our- 
selves, out of our dreams and aspirations, to 
breathe a while the purer if rarer atmosphere 
of the Unknown. He shows us that our loft- 



60 The Deeper Faith 

iest ideals are less lofty than eternity, that 
beyond Beauty and Goodness and Truth 
lies the mystery that transcends all things, 
and that in this mystery our souls may find 
certain refuge when every other source of 
comfort seems to fail. 



LI 

Does this mean that in finding peace of 
soul to be independent of the realization of 
our ideals we shall love these ideals less, shall 
strive less earnestly for their attainment? 
By no means. I have written all in vain if I 
have not shown that freedom from slavery 
to our ideals means before all else freedom to 
love them with a love more profound, endur- 
ing, and beautiful — a love in which there is no 
admixture of selfish fear of failure. We begin 
now to love them solely for what they are in 
themselves, and not for any benefit which we 
may expect to receive from their realization. 
We love them although we cannot be sure 



The Deeper Faith 61 

that we shall ever attain them. "Those who 
fight only for victory," says George Tyrrell, 
' ' grow slack when victory is hopeless. Those 
who fight for hate or love will fight till they 
drop." We can lust after the attainable; but 
we cannot lust after the unattainable — we 
can only love it. Perhaps it is in the service 
of a God of whose very existence we are not 
sure that our souls become conscious of their 
deepest possibilities, of a nobility and beauty 
grounded in the Infinite. 



LII 

As the soul of man develops, the number of 
things which he deems necessary to his wel- 
fare diminishes, until finally the entire objec- 
tive universe, with all it contains of wonder 
and beauty, is seen to be after all a luxury. 
To the fully enlightened man the only neces- 
sity is his own soul. The Eastern mystic's 
contempt of the phenomenal world is perhaps 
simply the revolt of the spiritually minded 
against every form of waste and extravagance 



62 The Deeper Faith 

carried to its logical conclusion. The Bud- 
dhist initiate objects to the world process of 
birth, growth, and decay, because it is un- 
necessary. Since Brahm is eternally, why 
have we need of time and its illusions ? 

We have no need. But what the Brahmin 
seems to forget (in theory if not in practice) 
is that the useless things are the most divine. 
It is precisely because life is like a play with- 
out deeper significance than its own joyous- 
ness that we can accept it without injury to 
our souls. But in order to enter the kingdom 
of heaven we must become as children, who, 
without overestimating the larger significance 
of their activity, or constructing a cosmic phi- 
losophy from the elements of baseball, take 
endless delight in playing the game for its own 
sake. 

LIII 

One great truth, however, we moderns 
have still to learn from the ascetic: that the 
only path to the free joyousness of the play- 



The Deeper Faith 63 

attitude toward life is the path of renuncia- 
tion. Not until we have learned to live 
without the world should we begin to enjoy the 
world. True other-worldliness is not hostile 
to the natural joy of living; on the contrary 
it alone produces that inner freedom which is 
the prerequisite of all innocent appreciation 
of the good and fair things of earth. It is 
Saint Francis, not Don Juan, who under- 
stands and loves the glad melody of bird song 
and the awful beauty of the rose of dawn. 
Renounce the world in order to enjoy the 
universe: you have no sooner done so than 
you rediscover the world in its proper 
place in the cosmic order. Thus only does 
the world become beautiful to the spirit; for 
the beauty of an object is revealed only to the 
heart that senses the relation of the object 
to the Whole. 

LIV 

Let us return now to a consideration of 
personal love and see if these few and neces- 



64 The Deeper Faith 

sarily somewhat vague philosophical reflec- 
tions will cast any new light on the spiritual 
value of such love. If in order to enjoy the 
world without endangering our inner freedom 
we must be capable of renouncing the world, 
this will be no less true if we substitute for 
the world, the people whom we love. "I 
shall never marry," said a woman with pride, 
"I shall never marry unless I meet a man 
whom I believe to be absolutely necessary to 
my existence. ' ' But this is precisely the man 
she should under no circumstances marry; 
for in marrying him she will become not his 
wife, but his slave. Not until she knows 
herself capable of living wisely and beautifully 
apart from him should she consent to live 
with him. 



LV 

If there is anywhere in the world a being 
whose presence is necessary to the peace of 
your soul you are as much in a state of bond- 
age as the meanest slave of an oriental despot. 



The Deeper Faith 65 

However, love comes to free us, not to en- 
slave us; and he may not boast the highest 
love who does not know the mystic joy of 
solitude. The test of the depth and value of 
your affection is not whether you are happy 
when you are with your beloved, but whether 
you are happy when you are alone. 



LVI 

There is profound spiritual significance in 
the fact that we reserve the glorious title 
"free love" for that love which is of all, the 
most in bondage to blind passion. It seems 
we have not yet learned that in disregarding 
the social welfare for the sake of love we 
prove, not that our love is free, but that we 
are slaves. 

LVII 

There were two men who loved a woman. 
And when the first man learned that his love 
was not returned, he went out in despair, and 



66 The Deeper Faith 

hanged himself. But the other said to the 
woman : ' ' Do you know what I shall do now 
that I know you do not love me? I shall 
think more beautiful thoughts, I shall dream 
more beautiful dreams, I shall do greater 
deeds because I have known you. And then, 
perhaps I shall some day awaken in you the 
love that understands. For I begin to believe 
that it is my fault that you do not love me, 
that it is always our fault if those about us 
do not love us as we desire to be loved. And 
even if fate should decree that I should never 
see you again, I should still find life sweet; 
I shall cling mightily to existence, for exist- 
ence would mean to me before all else the 
thought of you." 

Which of these two men, therefore, loved 
with the greater love? 



LVIII 

By the gift of happiness which it bears in 
its arms, tenderly as a mother her babe, may 



The Deeper Faith 67 

we judge the spiritual value of the love that 
is knocking at the door of our hearts. We 
must open only to the goddess who ap- 
proaches smiling. Or if there be tears in her 
eyes they must be peaceful tears, unstained 
by bitterness or regret, tears that reflect and 
crystally enhance the beauty of the soul which 
gives them birth, even as the dewdrop mingles 
in its depths the azure of heaven, and the 
softer blue of its patron violet, enriching 
both. 

LIX 

"She is capable of a wonderful happiness," 
wrote to me a friend in reference to a woman 
whom we both loved. This was indeed high 
praise, for it would be difficult to conceive 
a loftier ideal for the individual than this of 
making himself worthy of a wonderful happi- 
ness. A truly sublime happiness is attained 
only by the cherishing and developing of all 
that is purest and best in the soul. It is a 
royal guest to whom one dare not offer an 



68 The Deeper Faith 

unswept and ungarnished chamber lest he 
take offence and hurriedly depart. 

"It is happiness that ennobles," says Ib- 
sen's Rosmer. Christianity has been prone 
to overemphasize the value of misfortune and 
suffering in the purification of the soul. It is 
not always in the dark hours of personal grief 
that the surest faith in an Unseen Power is 
born. It is not always when one is weary of 
earth and its passing pleasures that one ex- 
periences the prof oundest yearning for heaven 
and its divine peace. There is a happiness so 
great that it snaps the chains which confine 
it to earth and rises toward the sky and the 
Beauty that is beyond the stars. There are 
times when the soul is uplifted on the wings of 
importunate ecstasy, when nothing seems too 
good to be true, and one stretches out one's 
arms to the whole universe to embrace it. 
Perhaps is the faith in life born of such an 
hour of sunshine a more beautiful and 
enduring thing than the faith conceived 
and brought forth in the night of personal 
grief. 



The Deeper Faith 69 

I say " personal grief," for there is an im- 
personal sorrow which is no less beneficent 
than a wonderful happiness. It seems, in- 
deed, that the nobler and loftier happiness 
and sorrow become, the nearer do they ap- 
proach each other; until at last one may no 
longer distinguish between them, and it is 
not possible to say whether a smile or a tear 
is fraught with greater comfort to the soul. 



LX 

What is most shocking in the spiritual 
condition of the masses of men is their in- 
ability to sympathize with a happiness that 
is not closely identified with their personal 
welfare. Their joys and sorrows are no 
greater than themselves. In short, they are 
incapable of a wonderful happiness ; and that 
is the substance of their condemnation. This 
is the fault of the present economic structure 
of society, which encourages man to concern 
himself primarily with his fate as an in- 



70 The Deeper Faith 

dividual, to degrade those sublime words, 
happiness and unhappiness, to the service of 
so petty a matter as his personal fortune. 
There are, of course, those who defend the 
present system of brute selfishness with the 
specious plea that it is in the struggle for 
personal supremacy that man develops the 
best of his powers. But we need not waste 
words in refuting an argument the mere 
statement of which is sufficient to discredit 
it in the eyes of every unprejudiced student 
of life. Lust and greed and criminal hate, 
these are the too obvious products of man's 
acquiescence in that blind struggle for exist- 
ence which was nature's makeshift method of 
progress before she conceived intelligence and 
brought forth the free human soul. Those 
who deny the inapplicability of a crude law 
of animal survival to man in the fullness 
of his divine stature, deny at once and 
the same time the primary posit of every 
true religion and the collective testimony 
of the noblest beings that have walked this 
earth. 



The Deeper Faith 7 1 

LXI 

One says truly that suffering purifies the 
soul; but let us not deceive ourselves, the 
question here is of spiritual, not of physical, 
suffering. It is they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness who are blessed. A heart 
hungering for love, not an empty stomach, 
is the proper receptacle for the bread of life. 
The fear of the Lord, not the fear of starva- 
tion, is the beginning of wisdom. 



LXII 

Not in the struggle for existence, but in the 
struggle for life — eternal life, is the soul of 
man made beautiful. Was it in the process of 
earning his daily bread that Shelley rose to 
the sublime genius of Prometheus ? Was it in 
the sweat of his brow, toiling at the bench of a 
carpenter, that Jesus of Nazareth revealed the 
all-embracing fire of his love ? Or was it rather 
in the useless and beautiful tears which he shed 
over Jerusalem, the slayer of the prophets? 



72 The Deeper Faith 

LXIII 

The new ideal of social justice, which al- 
ready to-day shines as a guiding star on the 
hearts of millions of awakened men and 
women, aims at giving to the toiling masses 
of humanity their due share of a wonderful 
happiness. True, one cannot bestow happi- 
ness upon another. Happiness is an inner 
state born of the individual soul. But one 
can bestow leisure; and it is in the hour of 
rest that the soul labors. 



LXIV 

There are those who assure us that enforced 
toil is a blessing, that it develops character 
by strengthening the will. History gives 
them the lie. Primitive man was of necessity 
far more industrious than are we ; yet his soul 
slumbered within him. Strictly speaking he 
had no character; he was moved by forces 
outside his will. It was not until he could 



The Deeper Faith 73 

afford to be less industrious, until he was the 
possessor of periods of time in which he could 
do what he willed to do, that he became in 
any real sense a moral being. In those first 
divine hours when, freed from economic 
necessity, he grew conscious of deeper forces 
within him seeking expression, he began the 
construction of his masterpieces: religion, 
philosophy, art. The Spirit at last awakened 
from the sleep of centuries, and started on the 
long journey upwards to the sunlit heights of 
freedom and happiness. Man, no longer mere 
animal, walked upright and faced the heavens 
with eager, questioning eyes. Had the race 
been compelled to depend permanently upon 
enforced industry for progress we should to- 
day be savages roaming the forest wilds with 
no loftier desires than for food and shelter. 



LXV 

Social justice means the equable distribu- 
tion not so much of wealth, as of leisure. No 



74 The Deeper Faith 

doubt there will always be a certain amount of 
enforced work for each of us. But let us not 
dissemble the truth : enforced work is a curse, 
not a blessing, and our aim should be the 
reduction of it to a minimum for all men. 
The ideal of social justice is born of a belief 
in man, in the divine in him, which needs 
freedom from every form of external compul- 
sion adequately to express itself. 

Of course there will be those to whom free- 
dom will mean license. There are doubtless 
those to-day who are not vicious simply be- 
cause they have not time to be. But their 
numbers are small in comparison with those 
whom overwork drives to all forms of excesses, 
and cruel pleasures. Besides, virtue born of 
necessity is not genuine virtue. Only the free 
choice of goodness for its own sake has moral 
value. Suppose that from this moment to 
the end of your life every moment were your 
own absolutely, to do with as you liked, what 
use would you make of the gift? By your 
answer to that question will I read your 
spiritual horoscope ! 



The Deeper Faith 75 

When men are free we shall at last be able 
to distinguish essential goodness, the good- 
ness of the soul, from the artificial, apparent 
goodness which is dependent for its continu- 
ance upon external, unwelcome circumstances. 
The sheep will be separated from the goats 
without the assistance of a mechanical Judg- 
ment Day, and in a few generations there will 
be no more goats. 



LXVI 

Freedom will not necessarily make men 
happier. Leisure produces its Schopenhauers 
as well as its Goethes. Doubtless the amount 
of sorrow will be as great as that which exists 
to-day, but it will be a lofty sorrow, so lofty 
that it will seem, as I have said, indistinguish- 
able from happiness. It will be a sorrow that 
springs not from personal misfortune but from 
sympathy with the eternal travail of the 
universe. It will be a sorrow far worthier of 
men than the trivial pleasures with which 



76 The Deeper Faith 

to-day the masses must content themselves. 
The barriers of selfishness will be burned 
away by the pure flame of mysticism, and 
soul rush to soul, and love, and grow beauti- 
ful. And whether it be a common sorrow or a 
common joy that unites two souls what does 
it matter, so but their union be productive of 
beauty ! 

LXVII 

No one in recent times has more clearly 
perceived the supreme end of human exist- 
ence than Guyau: as the following quotation 
from Ulrreligion de UAvenir will demon- 
strate : 

"One day when I was seated at my desk 
my wife came up to me and exclaimed: 'How 
melancholy you look! What is the matter 
with you? Tears, mon Dieu! Is it anything 
that I have done?' 'Of course not; it is 
never anything that you have done. I was 
weeping over a bit of abstract thought, of 
speculation on the world and the destiny of 



The Deeper Faith 77 

things. Is there not enough misery in the 
world to justify an aimless tear? And of 
joy to justify an aimless smile?' The great 
totality of things in which man lives may well 
demand a smile or a tear from him, and it is 
his conscious solidarity with the universe, the 
impersonal joy and pain that he is capable of 
experiencing, the faculty, so to speak, of im- 
personating himself, that is the most durable 
element in religion and philosophy. To 
sympathize with the whole universe, to wish 
to contribute to its amelioration, to overpass 
the limits of our egoism and live the life of 
the universe, is the distinguishing pursuit of 
humanity." 



LXVIII 

The history of humanity is indeed the 
history of the struggle of eternity with time. 
The human soul is the battleground upon 
which these two ancient cosmic enemies come 
to a desperate and determined grapple. 



78 The Deeper Faith 

There is no hope of parley : the duel is to the 
death. 

LXIX 

We are intended to be the channels of the 
Eternal, and it is through us that the Beauty 
that is beyond the stars seeks to express itself 
upon earth. We were created for the service 
of a queen whose face we may not look upon ; 
only in fighting her battles do we fulfill our 
destiny, and though we turn traitor and enlist 
under the gaudier banners of time yet will 
our defection bring us only pain and weariness 
of spirit, and we shall find no peace till we 
return to the arms of our long-suffering 
mother. 

LXX 

We are alone in our vision of a Truth that 
endures. No other being on this earth knows 
what we know, can read what we read in the 
cryptic messages of the intuitional soul. All 
are blinded by the light of the physical sun, 



The Deeper Faith 79 

all are in the service of things that pass away. 
We stand in spiritual isolation; in the midst 
of a world of growth and decay we have 
dreamed of a Kingdom where change shall be 
no more. And it is this dream alone which 
separates us forever from the rest of nature. 
Intelligence we share in varying degrees with 
other animals; morality, too, is not exclu- 
sively a human possession; but what living 
creature besides man has produced a mystic ? 



LXXI 

Happiness for us is dependent upon our 
rising above the sharp barrier that separates 
one moment from the next, so that "life may 
no more jolt nor jar but glide." "Eschew the 
pleasure of the moment, that is, the pleasure 
which can exist only in a temporal order of 
things," so speaks to us the voice of our 
deepest convictions. There is a joy that has 
no reference to time and place ; this is the joy 
toward which we must yearn with all our 



8o The Deeper Faith 

hearts. This is the joy that lives only in the 
innermost recesses of our being, at the meet- 
ing point of the soul and the Unseen Reality. 
This is the joy which accompanies the highest 
love, whether individual or universal. 



LXXII 

It is of contrast that the pleasures of the 
moment are woven. Abundance spells sa- 
tiety. Were there no past pain with which to 
compare it our present pleasure would lose 
much of its intensity. But the happiness of 
the Eternal is incomparably unique; there is 
nothing with which one may contrast it. 
Furthermore the capacity of the soul is 
limitless. One can never have too much of the 
peace born of communion with the Beauty 
that is beyond the stars. 

LXXIII 

I have said: "It seems indeed that the 
nobler and loftier happiness and sorrow be- 



The Deeper Faith 81 

come, the nearer do they approach each 
other. ' ' Is this not true of all our experience ? 
As we strive to ennoble the individual hours 
of life we find that they tend to grow more and 
more alike, as people that live together are 
wont to do, until it is with difficulty that we 
can distinguish between them. Finally they 
will merge and become part of a timeless, 
transcendent Reality. Then there will re- 
main neither past nor future; but only a 
limitless present which is as a window through 
which the benign rays of the Eternal pour in 
unsullied glory. This is the Nirvana of Bud- 
dhism, perhaps, after all, the noblest creation 
of the religious faculty. 



LXXIV 

Man achieves immortality, then, by the 
deliberate choice of his conscious will. So- 
crates was right in his assertion that to know 
the good is to do the good; he was wrong in 
limiting knowledge to the realm of the intel- 



82 The Deeper Faith 

lect. Truth is a matter of the whole man, and 
it is only in developing all our powers that we 
clarify our vision of Reality. Mere intellec- 
tual assent to a proposition is not knowledge ; 
nor until we have felt and willed the good 
which our intellect perceives, do we know it to 
exist. 

LXXV 

By the renunciation of temporal goods, 
under the influence of the highest love, man 
enters into Eternal Life, which is simply life 
lived in the conscious presence of the Eternal 
Values. His salvation consists in the realiza- 
tion of himself as the organ of these Eternal 
Values, as part of a divine and infinite Un- 
known ; and social progress is to be measured 
by the extent to which the mass of men have 
attained to such self-realization. 

LXXVI 

Judged by this standard the existent social 
order has little to recommend it. A small 



The Deeper Faith 83 

minority of the living, more favored of for- 
tune than their fellows, have succeeded in 
partially extricating themselves from the 
whirlpool of selfishness which we call civiliza- 
tion. They have attained to a certain meas- 
ure of self-realization, and know the peace of 
soul which the world cannot give. But into 
the sordid lives of the trodden masses such 
blessedness can find no entrance. Brutalized 
by the pitiless struggle with their fellows for 
the means of subsistence, and dwarfed in body 
and mind by the insistent weight of enforced 
joyless labor, they live and die with no vision 
of a happiness deeper and more enduring 
than the fleeting, selfish pleasures with which 
they blindly seek to console themselves for the 
keener pangs of existence. Their religion is 
purely formal, for they have no time to exper- 
ience spiritually the truths in which they pro- 
fess to believe. Art and philosophy are 
abracadabra, the mere foam of words, pale 
and without substance. So they live and so 
they perish, full in the clutch of time who 
mumbles them for his sport. 



84 The Deeper Faith 

LXXVII 

What is to be the remedy ? How are we to 
bring to the mass of men that consciousness 
of their high destiny which is happiness? I 
have said before, we cannot bestow happiness 
upon another. Happiness is born of the 
individual soul, and the happiness of each 
soul is unique. What the masses need is not 
reformation nor education, both in their 
present forms the social weapons of the snob 
and the egotist, nor religious creeds nor 
pseudo-philosophic jargon, — but simply leis- 
ure. They need to be left alone, they need 
the healing influence of solitude without 
which the soul of man cannot develop in 
harmony and beauty. They need the gift 
of free time; for it takes time to overcome 
time. 



LXXVIII 

The trouble with the reformer is that he has 
completely forgotten the presence in human- 



The Deeper Faith 85 

ity of the Unknown. He goes about the edu- 
cation of the masses with the confidence of 
the omniscient. Why should he hesitate? 
He knows the things that satisfy his nature; 
he sees the mass of men deprived of and even 
indifferent to, these things. He follows the 
dictates of a too obvious logic. He becomes 
scientific; which is the final stage of human 
degradation. For what clearer evidence of 
total spiritual blindness could one give than 
the resolve to treat man, the incarnation of 
mystery, with the impersonal exactitude of 
science ? 



LXXIX 

Let us remember always that the final value 
of knowledge is as a window to the Unknown. 
Education is simply the development of the 
sense of wonder. The value of a civiliza- 
tion is to be measured by the extent to which 
it permits the entrance into human life of a 
supernatural, or at least superterrestrial, 
radiance ; and every Utopia is foredoomed to 



86 The Deeper Faith 

failure that does not take into account the 
fact that man is "incurably religious." 



LXXX 

When shall we learn to respect the un- 
known god who resides in every human being ? 
Not until we have come into communion with 
the god in our own hearts. Then we shall 
understand that what our less fortunate 
brothers demand of us is not so much food 
and clothing and shelter, or education, or 
any manifestation of brotherly concern and 
affection, but the simple gift of leisure, free 
hours sufficient for self-realization, the cup of 
solitude into which alone God pours the wine 
of life. 



LXXXI 

This, then, is the problem that society 
has to solve : the more equable distribution of 
those leisure hours which are breath of life 



The Deeper Faith 87 

to the soul. Industry must be so organized 
that to each man there shall be a goodly 
portion of free time in which to seek the self- 
realization which is peace. This can be only 
achieved by the elimination of the waste of 
competition, by the substitution of the ideal 
of cooperation as the most efficient method of 
industrial production, and by the simplifi- 
cation of the standards of living, that human 
labor may no longer be prostituted to the 
production of worthless and harmful luxuries. 



LXXXII 

But however much he may desire the com- 
ing of justice, for the enlightened man there 
can be no weapon of warfare but persuasion, 
there is no victory but the victory of bringing 
light to another soul. He who wholly and 
heartily believes in the omnipotence of the 
divine will inevitably disparage the use, either 
by the individual or by society, of any form 
of restraint in dealing with the evil-doer. 



88 The Deeper Faith 

After all, law exists not by reason of its inher- 
ent merit as a means of combating evil but 
solely because of the good man's cowardice, 
his lack of faith. Arbitrary punishment is 
always baneful in its influence, for it fosters 
in the social consciousness the idea that good- 
ness is not attractive enough to win men with- 
out extraneous sanctions. Every time we 
punish a crime we make it so much harder for 
those tempted to commit this crime to con- 
quer their desire; for we are nourishing the 
conviction that crime in itself is so attractive 
and remuneratory that only by inflicting the 
severest penalties for its commission can we 
dissuade men from constantly resorting to 
murder, robbery, and so forth. 

If a thief steals my purse and I have him 
sent to prison I am fostering in his mind the 
conviction that my purse is a very valuable 
thing, and he will be tempted to try to steal 
it again should he have the opportunity. If, 
however, I turn to him and say with a smile, 
"Who steals my purse steals trash! You are 
welcome to it. Worldly goods are of no ac- 



The Deeper Faith 89 

count," he will begin to have his doubts 
about the advantages of theft. 

This is the attitude which society should 
take — an attitude of utter fearlessness, the 
attitude of heroic souls. 



LXXXIII 

It was the principle of non-resistance, as 
exemplified in the lives of the saints and the 
martyrs, which brought about the triumph of 
the Christian religion in the centuries after 
Christ. When the Church renounced that 
doctrine, took up arms and became a world 
power, her doom was sealed. For the ser- 
mon on the mount is not the impossibly ideal 
moral code of a fanatic; it is the only sane 
and practical program of enduring reform. 



LXXXIV 

We have thrown about the teaching of 
Jesus the same forbidding glory that sur- 



90 The Deeper Faith 

rounds his person. The unique deification of 
Jesus by Christians relieved them of the 
obligation to live as their master lived. To 
make Christ God is the easiest way of weaken- 
ing the exigent beauty of his personality. 
It thus becomes impossible to cite to a Chris- 
tian, as an example of what man should be, 
the life of the prophet of Nazareth. He will 
shake his head wisely and murmur, "Ah, but 
Jesus was God, we are only men." By mak- 
ing their heroes more than human men dis- 
creetly free themselves from the necessity of 
living great and good lives. 



LXXXV 

God punishes evil-doers by the fact of His 
existence, and that is the only punishment He 
needs to employ. That the good is and that 
it is destined to triumph, persuade the wicked 
man of this and you have at one and the same 
time punished and reformed him. Persuade 
him of this by demonstrating your own utter 



The Deeper Faith 9 1 

faith in Right and its ultimate triumph, which 
does not need bars and gyves or the guillotine 
to accomplish its ends. Instead of that you 
kill or imprison him, thus proving to his 
entire satisfaction that he was right in believ- 
ing that there is nothing between evil doing 
and success but physical force — the force of 
the cowardly majority of "good" men. 



LXXXVI 

But must we not at least protect the weak 
from the brutalities of the strong and wicked ? 
Shall we stand by idly, without protest, while 
evil triumphs and the heathen rage? The 
good need no protection but the conscious- 
ness of their own goodness ; and the better a 
man becomes, the more emphatically will he 
decry the use of force in his defense. Jesus 
rebuked Peter grasping the sword ; at no other 
moment of his career did he evidence more 
clearly his utter faith in the omnipotence of 
Goodness. 



92 The Deeper Faith 

LXXXVII 

It does not matter if good men perish: 
Goodness endures. It is at the heart of things, 
it is the universe. The triumph of Truth is 
not dependent on our feeble efforts: Truth 
triumphs eternally; It is, though worlds de- 
cay. We do not need to build the kingdom of 
heaven, we have only to open our eyes and 
find it perfect, complete, as it has been from 
all eternity, as it shall be forever. It does not 
need us, but we need it. Our one duty is to 
save ourselves, to discover the divinity that 
resides within us, that our souls may be free 
of every external compulsion. 



LXXXVIII 

It is not the good who need to be protected 
from the cruelty of the wicked, it is the wicked 
who need to be protected from the cowardice 
of the good; for it is cowardice that blurs 
man's spiritual vision and makes him incap- 



The Deeper Faith 93 

able of seeing things in their true proportions. 
The cowardly good stand between the wicked 
and the regenerating light of Truth. How 
can we expect the wicked to believe in Good- 
ness if the faith of the good is so weak that it 
is afraid of suffering and death ? 



LXXXIX 

Says Mr. Paul Elmer More: "It would be 
hard to exaggerate the importance of this 
discovery, made so many years ago in the 
forest of India, that the eternal and infinite 
expectation of the soul is not to be sought in 
submission to an incomprehensible and in- 
human force impelling the world, nor yet in 
obedience to a personal God, but is already 
within us awaiting revelation, is in fact our 
very Self of Self." This is the Truth that 
saves, the knowledge that God is within us, 
that every sin is a sin against Self. How are 
we to persuade men of this truth? By relin- 
quishing every form of arbitrary punishment, 



94 The Deeper Faith 

by leaving the wicked to the vengeance of the 
divinity in their own hearts. For every time 
we punish a human being we make it so much 
harder for the voice of conscience to speak to 
him ; but every sin that we forgive is an exi- 
gent summons to tjie Unknown God that 
slumbers in the heart of the offender. Let us 
show the evil-doer that what stands between 
him and success is not the revengeful power of 
just men but the more potent sorrow of his 
own outraged soul. 



XC 

The only legitimate function of social 
organization is the production of enlightened 
human beings. Now the salient feature of 
enlightenment is self-sufficiency. This is the 
Rome to which all roads of spiritual endea- 
vor lead. And he who arrives at the goal 
finds himself freed of fear and of every de- 
sire to punish. "No one can harm me but 
myself." 



The Deeper Faith 95 

xci 

It is not an easy doctrine, this of non- 
resistance, nor one likely to find wide accept- 
ance in our hesitant age of efficiency, when 
waste is the one unpardonable sin. Of our 
spiritual leaders, as of our men of affairs, we 
demand immediate results; and no prophet 
may hope for a hearing among us who cannot 
first of all convince us that he is a practical 
man. And to be a practical man means 
neither more nor less than to be driven by the 
fear of remaining personally ineffectual to 
the adoption of compromise as a method of 
achieving reform. 



XCII 

There is no subtler, and consequently more 
dangerous, form of egotism than that which 
leads us to confuse the success or failure of the 
ideals for which we stand with our personal 
success or failure. Once let a man become 



96 The Deeper Faith 

convinced that the ideal which he loves can 
never become effectual among men save 
through his personal efforts, and there is no 
foreseeing to what depths of trickery and 
base compromise he may descend to achieve 
his purpose. And the more passionately he 
loves his ideal the greater will be the tempta- 
tion to sacrifice everything to its attainment. 



XCIII 

It is this very sense of false responsibility 
that has so much to do with the overwhelm- 
ing fear of failure which is the curse of mod- 
ern life. From this foul stalk springs the 
terrible carrion-flower of international jeal- 
ousy and hate. Thus we Americans have 
convinced ourselves that we are the divinely 
appointed guardians of political liberty and 
that were America, the land of the free, to 
perish in the struggle for existence, the ideal 
of political liberty would perish with her. 
So we reinforce our natural egotism by the 



The Deeper Faith 97 

assumption of a moral purpose, and in the 
name of liberty prepare to defend ourselves 
against the attack of a foreign enemy. Thus, 
also, England, under the guise of assuming 
"the white man's burden" of educating in- 
ferior races to the broad intellectual outlook 
of British Philistinism, has felt called upon 
by the voice of God to subjugate and rule 
every portion of the inhabitable globe on 
which she can successfully lay the heavy hand 
of empire. 

And as it is with nations, so also with 
individuals. Do we not know men in public 
life who have used every means, however 
vile, to further their own advance, on the 
plea that it was necessary for them to attain 
to political prominence before they could 
carry out the reforms which lay so near their 
hearts? Do we not behold similar instances 
in our industrial world ? How often is it not 
urged in extenuation of some financial giant 
that though the means he used to attain his 
position of control may not always have been 
above suspicion yet the use which he has 



98 The Deeper Faith 

made of his power is ample justification for 
whatever in his past will not bear a too close 
scrutiny. Is not our civilization poisoned at 
the very source by the fetid doctrine of exped- 
iency ? 



XCIV 

The means justifies the end! So they 
have ever argued, who love life and success 
more than the Eternal Values. And it seems 
we have not yet realized the absurdity of a 
theory which divides existence into two dis- 
junctive entities, which does not see that 
every means is itself an end, that Eternal Life 
is above all a question of this present moment. 
Now and again some prophet of God's truth 
raises his warning voice against the cowardly 
temporizing so characteristic of our genera- 
tion, but deafened by the insistent sophistries 
of our practical reformers, we cannot hear, 
we cannot understand. 



The Deeper Faith 99 

xcv 

And yet, were we to study the lives of the 
great and good men of all ages, we should 
surely learn that there is but one way to live 
for an ideal, namely, to live as though that 
ideal were already a reality. Act as you 
would act were the world of which you dream 
the real world; so speaks the voice of the 
Spirit. Is it not true that the reality of our 
ideals is in large measure dependent upon 
ourselves, that we create the environment in 
which we live ? If I believe in justice it is not 
necessary that I should wait until all men 
accept that ideal before making it a reality 
in my life. It is necessary only that I should 
be just, it is necessary that I should not 
compromise with injustice. If, however, in 
order to reach a position of power in which I 
may make justice accepted of all men I des- 
cend to the accomplishment of one act of in- 
justice I have nullified in advance the effect 
of all my efforts. 



ioo The Deeper Faith 

XCVI 

Let us live always in the highest world 
which we can conceive to exist ; it is the most 
effectual way of helping others as well as 
ourselves. The highest is still the best; and 
there is no fear that our most beautiful 
dreams can ever exhaust Reality. Let us 
refuse to descend into a lower sphere in order 
to attain a greater degree of efficiency. All 
the lower levels of vision are more plentifully 
inhabited than ours, and the higher we climb 
the fewer are our companions. Nevertheless 
we must not waver. If we succumb to the 
cold of the summits, others, stronger and no 
less determined, will follow. . . . And we 
shall at least have lived our deepest lives. 



XCVII 

Compromise is essentially a living down to 
the public — a thing to be shunned as pesti- 
lence by all to whom the art of noble living is 



The Deeper Faith 101 

a holy and enduring joy. So thought Jesus 
when he gave himself to be crucified rather 
than compromise with the authorities, so 
thought Luther, and Shelley, and Karl Marx. 
So thought our own Sidney Lanier, when after 
having endured years of penury rather than 
for one moment prostitute the high gift of 
poetry that was in him he penned those sub- 
lime words: "It is of little consequence 
whether I fail ; the I in the matter is a small 
business: 'Que mon nom soit fletri, que la 
France soit libre !' quoth Danton ; which is to 
say, interpreted by my environment : Let my 
name perish — the poetry is good poetry and 
the music good music, and beauty dieth not, 
and the heart that needs it will find it." 



XCVIII 

There is an argument in favor of compro- 
mise not infrequently employed in these latter 
days even by men of spiritual insight, an 
argument the more dangerous because it 



102 The Deeper Faith 

makes its appeal to one of the finest moral 
attributes, the spirit of tolerance. It begins 
with the universally acknowledged postulate 
that human beings are weak and erring 
creatures, passing from this to the conclusion 
that it is not just to demand too much of 
their undeveloped spiritual powers. One 
must be willing to meet them half way. One 
must allow for the fact that man is still in his 
childhood, that he has not attained to the 
self-control and balance of maturity. One 
must not expect him to aspire to the unat- 
tainable. 

Now in so far as this course of reasoning 
tends to make us more charitable toward our 
neighbor, his shortcomings and inconsisten- 
cies of conduct, his failure to attain the ideal, 
it is wholly salutary in its influence. We 
cannot be too tolerant of one another; we 
cannot be too ready to forgive and to forget. 
The growth of the spirit of universal tolerance 
is surely one of the most inspiring facts of the 
modern era. Nothing is more certain than 
that every attempt on our part to pass moral 



The Deeper Faith 103 

judgment upon the act of another is impertin- 
ent and absurd ; for not until we know all the 
antecedents of an act can we judge as to its 
moral value, and granted such omniscience 
we should doubtless find that there was 
nothing to forgive. 

We must be tolerant even of ourselves. It 
is not always easy to forgive others their 
trespasses against us; but it is more difficult 
to forgive ourselves. And yet one is perhaps 
not truly good until one has forgiven oneself 
everything. Indeed it is possible that for- 
giveness of others is somewhat of hypocrisy 
in him who has not yet learned to for- 
give himself. Is not remorse, after all, 
only a subtle form of vengeance? And 
if I cannot learn to forgive a sin in my- 
self how shall I forgive the same sin in 
another ? 

But when it is urged, as it often is, that 
because man is morally frail therefore we 
must lower our ideals to fit the exigencies of 
human nature, the plea becomes at once 
specious and entirely harmful in its influence. 



104 The Deeper Faith 

For while it is impossible that we should be 
too tolerant in regard to the shortcomings of 
men, their failure to realize their ideals in 
their daily lives, it is no less impossible that 
we should be too exacting in demanding of 
men the very highest ideals of which they 
are capable. We must indeed be tolerant of 
the failings of actual humanity, we dare not 
and must not be tolerant of any blemish in 
that glorified humanity which should exist 
as an ideal in the soul of every man and 
woman. We must not make our heaven less 
beautiful in order to make it more attainable. 
For by so much as we lower our ideals by so 
much do we lower the real ; and conversely to 
ennoble our ideals is to ennoble in like meas- 
ure the course of our daily lives. The distance 
between the ideal and the real remains ever 
constant; they move on different planes but 
they never vary their relative positions. 
"Be ye perfect," said Jesus to his disciples, 
knowing well that they could not fulfill his 
injunction. They did not become perfect, 
doubtless, Peter, and James and John, and 



The Deeper Faith 105 

the rest; but they approached nearer perfec- 
tion than they could have done had their 
Master offered them an ideal less lofty, a goal 
within reach of their attainment. 



XCIX 

Are we not justified, then, in assuming that 
only in uncompromising fidelity to the high- 
est ideal which we can conceive do we fulfill 
our destiny? This alone is happiness, this 
alone is success, that one should have utter 
confidence in the impulses of the soul, follow- 
ing them gladly and freely whether they lead 
to the scaffold or to the throne. And as for 
efficiency and achievement, who shall judge 
of these things? Or why should one be 
greatly troubled by such considerations, 
bred as they are of an unworthy fear 
of failure, since in trusting the soul one 
knows oneself in harmony with the Unseen 
Reality in which is neither impotence nor 
defeat ? 



io6 The Deeper Faith 



Finally, let us remember that it is always 
possible to die, Death has been too often 
regarded as the enemy of man, the cruel 
destroyer who drags us from the feast of life 
just when the merriment has reached its 
height. In reality, death is the kindest and 
most loyal of all our friends. He is the de- 
fender of things virtuous, he is the eternal 
guardian of the inner freedom. To the good 
man he is the source of courage in the battle, 
of new hope in the hour of defeat; through the 
agony of the torture chamber the martyr 
glimpses the approaching form of the last 
liberator and steels himself to bear what yet 
remains of his portion of earthly suffering. 
Were man not mortal the triumph of evil 
upon earth would be complete ; for who of us 
could boast the will to defy the ungodly and 
bear an eternity of unmitigated torture for 
the sake of an ideal, however beautiful? It 
is the knowledge that the power of the wicked, 
and of the foolish, also, is limited by the 



The Deeper Faith 107 

boundaries of the kingdom of the dead, it is 
this divine knowledge alone that can imbue 
us with the unfaltering passion for the highest 
in life, with the determination to give our- 
selves in all things to the service of the 
Eternal Values. 



CI 

And, again, Death is the unfailing reminder 
to us of the existence of the Unknown. Im- 
mersed in the petty cares and pleasures of 
daily living we are prone to forget the mys- 
tery that surrounds our souls as the atmo- 
sphere surrounds our bodies. We grow sordid 
and selfish and unheeding of the things that 
abide; the lamp of the deeper faith flickers 
painfully in the fetid atmosphere of spiritual 
stagnation. Then it is Death who takes pity 
of us, it is Death who with the swift cruelty 
of love startles us from our torpor and re- 
vivifies the languid sinews of the soul. Kneel- 
ing beside the dead body of one whom he has 
loved, every man is a mystic. 



108 The Deeper Faith 

CII 

If it were not for Death it would be far 
more difficult to believe in God. We should 
perhaps accept the conclusions of a false 
science and see in the life of earth, in the 
behests of Nature, in the meaningless struggle 
to survive, the complete explanation of our 
complex spiritual selves. But so long as 
Death is, so long shall we know by the in- 
vincible logic of the heart that there is a 
Beauty beyond the stars in which and for 
which we live, that there is a Love that 
transcends time and that cares for us. For, 
as Hauptmann has said, "Death is the 
masterpiece of Eternal Love." 



CIII 

So with the glory of Life and the tenderness 
of Death as eternal witnesses of the inex- 
haustible goodness of the universe there is 
no reason why we should hesitate to live the 



The Deeper Faith 109 

highest life of which we are capable. All 
things speak to the soul urging it upward. 

He who thus throws himself blindly, con- 
fidingly, upon the Unseen Breast, renouncing 
every appeal to human law and sanction, 
trusting implicitly in the Spirit to do all 
things well, he finds the freedom and the 
peace which the world cannot give. In him 
is fulfilled the synthesis which is perhaps the 
goal of our present search; the merging of 
the mystic and the humanitarian. He will 
have great pity of the sorrows of men, and 
greater pity of the inner blindness which 
alone lends sorrow its bitter sting. He will 
be no idle dreamer ; he will do his share toward 
making the world a nobler, fairer dwelling 
place. But he will never forget that in order 
to enjoy the world, one must be ready at 
a moment to renounce all things and die, 
should the spirit so ordain. He will respect 
the free personalities of men; he will strive, 
not to save others, but only to give them the 
opportunity of saving themselves. He will 
know how to honor woman, and in the eyes of 



no The Deeper Faith 

a child will read strange, glad tidings. And 
ever in and beyond created things he will 
feel the presence of the Unknown, Source of 
all being and its ultimate desire. 



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